Character from Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
A parasitic hive-mind collective of shrieking tentacles that finances evil, sells snake oil, and gets stupider the more of them there are — the galaxy's worst franchise operation.
The Krakaren are what happens when you give a parasitic hive mind a business license. They operate the Apothecary — a front for selling harmful products to vulnerable crawlers — and finance the Plenty faction. They engage in pseudo-scientific debate, manipulate the vulnerable, and are 'intent upon destroying any semblance of scientific progress,' which is an ambitious mission statement for a collective of tentacles. The kicker: they grow stupider as time moves on despite being a collective consciousness. More tentacles, less brain. Even Eris, goddess of chaos, avoids association with them, which is the cosmic equivalent of being rejected by the person who sits alone at lunch by choice. Their relationship with the broader dungeon economy is parasitic in every sense — they extract resources, poison the marketplace with bad products, and reproduce faster than anyone can eliminate them. They're less a villain and more a systemic problem, which makes them authentically terrifying in a way that a single big bad never could be.
Multiple shrieking tentacles functioning as a unified consciousness — a parasitic organism capable of asexual reproduction and cloning. For every one killed, Krakaren Prime births two more. They spread across the galaxy like a MLM scheme with tentacles. The visual is 'every kraken nightmare you've had, but also it's running an Apothecary.'
Also known as: The Krakaren, Krakaren, Krakaren Prime